Hi Luca,
Okay, let's assume a chunk size of C. No matter what your md looks like,
the logical md volume consists of a series of size/C chunks. the very
first chunk C0 will hold the LVM header.
If I align the extends with the chunksize and the extends even have the
chunksize, then every extens PEx of my PV equals exactly a chunk on any
of
the disks.
Which in turn means, if I want to read PEx I have to read some chunk Cy
on
one disk, and PEx+1 would most certainly be a Chunk Cy+1 which would
reside on a different physical disk.

correct

So the question is: Why would you want to align the first PE to the
stripesize, rather then the chunksize?

Because when you _write_ incomplete stripes, the raid code
would need to do a read-modify-write of the parity block.

I didn't think of this 'yet', then again all the preliminary tests I did
so far were on a 4D raid10 - Didn't have the time to setup the raid5
volume yet, because the performance issues on the raid10 were so amazing
:-D.

Filesystem, like ext3/4 and xfs have the ability to account for stripe
size in the block allocator to prevent unnecessary read-modify-writes,
but if you do not stripe-align the start of the filesystem you cannot
take advantage of this.

Since you mentioned it: What is the specific option (for xfs mainly) to
modify this behavior?

The annoying issue is that rarely you have a (n^2)+P array, and pe_size
must be a power of 2.
So for example, given my 3D1P raid5 the only solution I devised was
having a chunk size which is a power of 2k, pe_start is aligned to
stripe, pe_size = chunk size, and I have to remember that every time I
extend a LV it has to be extended to the nearest multiple of 3 LE.

Ouch, I see, I'm gonna be as lucky as you :-).
Another question arose, when I thought about something: I actually wanted
to place the OS on a stripe of mirrors, since this gives me the
statistically best robustness against two failing disks. From what I could
read in the md man page, non of the offered raid10 modes provides such a
layout. Would I have to first mirror two drives with md and then stripe em
together with md on top of md?